Never waste a good crisis — part 6— Collected lessons and how these relate to Product development
Never waste a good crisis — part 6— Collected lessons and how these relate to Product development
What we can learn about better software product development from experiencing a crisis and what we can do moving forward.
This is the last of my re-edited series, ‘Never waste a good crisis’ originally written in 2020.
Start part 1 here of my 6-part series here:
Collected lessons and how these relate to product development
From my series of posts, we reach a number of conclusions and lessons we can draw from crises, in particular the covid-19 pandemic and the resulting accelerated implementation of Digital Transformation programmes.
These are lessons for us to apply in normal times. How we might bottle the positive elements of working in a crisis. So think of these lessons in the context of your own product and organisation.
Through analysis of the extraordinary state during a crisis we have established:
When we understand the value of achieving something, the work feels more certain and concrete. We can understand what progress looks like and the goal and measures of progress can function as an incentive.
Being explicit and clear in the purpose of all parts of our organisation and how they add up to address the organisation’s purpose is important to optimal performance, everyone knows how they can continue to contribute to supporting the organisation’s purpose.
Many practices in use by today’s organisations do not support making progress along the optimal path. Bias can lead to blind spots and decision-making should be regularly assessed and adjusted to account for bias.
We should prioritise investing time into fulfilling the purpose of the organisation and addressing what we have determined to be valuable.
The most meaningful measures of progress are through indicators that are evidence that demonstrate we are realising the value we seek.
…and when you do have a crisis…
Crises can be of different magnitudes. For every global pandemic, there are smaller crises which may impact something more localised. It could be a catastrophic failure of a product feature you are responsible for or a change in the market which threatens your market position.
So remember:
‘Never waste a good crisis’
In the moment, use it to rally people around a common direction.
Assess potential risks which could materialise into the next crisis and use the understanding of these threats and the realisation of a previous crisis to rally people around how addressing these may sit in relation to other pools of value you established using the lessons in this post.
After the fact review what it tells you about your organisation and what assumptions are worth challenging.
This has been part of a continuing series of posts:
